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By Roger
Hearing in Khojand, northern Tajikistan
I haven't been in many road accidents but from limited experience
I have noticed that there can be a moment of extreme, almost
absurd, clarity just before the crunch.
I had
just such a moment last week as our small taxi skidded off
the corniche in Khojand beside the Syr Darya river, taking
a rainwashed corner far too fast, and upending in a drainage
ditch.
What I
noticed at the time was that we appeared to be heading towards
a castle. There were walls, turrets, towers and a gate - I
remember that clearly - and then we hit the bottom of the
ditch.
I was
hurled forward onto John, our engineer, the windscreen fell
out and there was a tinny thump as I crashed my head on the
roof.
We scrambled
out, I wiping a little blood from my head and John cradling
a sprained arm.
After
some recuperation, he and our producer gathered our things
and continued in another taxi the few hundred yards to our
hotel.
Brush
with history
I wasn't
in the mood for getting straight back into one of Khojand's
creaky Ladas, and opted to walk, and it was then that I confirmed
through the cold drizzle, my vision - a castle.
The drainage
ditch in which we had landed was on the edge of a small park,
and further up there were two towers on either side of a gate,
and perhaps 30 metres of crenellated wall on either side of
them.
It was
all far too clean and neat to be original, but it was clearly
an attempt to reproduce something that had once been there.
Khojand
may look and feel like a post-Soviet backwater - it gives
the strong impression of having gone firmly to sleep 30 years
ago, and deeply resenting being roused now by the increasing
number of journalists for whom it has become a stopping point
on the way into Afghanistan.
But it
has a past.
The reconstructed
walls and gate in the park are, supposedly, on the site where
Alexander the Great laid the foundations for a city 2,300 years
ago.
It was
one of many cities he named Alexandria, but this one was called
Eschate - the furthest.
It was
on the edge of the world as far as he was concerned. It still
feels a bit that way.
Great
city
He wanted
a strong base beside the river he knew as the Tanais to keep
out the hostile tribes from the mountains and, according to
my copy of Arrian's history of the Campaigns of Alexander,
he felt that "without doubt both the number of its inhabitants
and the
splendour of its name would one day turn the new settlement
into a great city".
I can't help
feeling that if he saw it today, Khojand with its sweeping empty
avenues and its air of interminable slumber, would leave the
Macedonian conqueror a bit non-plussed.
Khojand
has been kinder to Lenin than most post-Soviet cities have
He might
also be a little miffed that these days another giant dominates
his foundation rather more than he does - quite literally,
because a statue of Vladimir Lenin, the largest in Central
Asia, looms over Khojand from the opposite river bank.
Silver
and grim, in that familiar "here's my left shoulder"
pose, his narrowed eyes gaze out over a city that was known
as Leninabad (Lenin City), until the Soviet collapse.
The fact
that he hasn't been toppled, like almost all the others in
the region, says more about the sleepiness of Khojand than
about its politics.
"That's
the sort of thing they do in the capital, Dushanbe,"
I was told when I asked why he hadn't been removed.
A place apart
Khojand,
you see, is in Tajikistan, but not exactly of it.
The majority
of people in the district are ethnic Uzbeks.
It was
only some ruthless line re-drawing on a Soviet bureaucrat's
map that put it in Tajikistan.
Khojand
is just a few short hours by road from the Uzbek capital,
Tashkent, but the daunting Fan mountains lie between it and
the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.
All of
which led to another rude jolt from Khojand's slumbers during
Tajikistan's civil war in the late '90s.
If I'd
looked left instead of straight on when we were crashing our
car last week, I'd have seen the side of a large hotel marked
by hundreds of bullet-scars.
Behind the
reconstructed castle is a military base, held briefly and defended
fiercely by a local warlord in 1998 with some support from a
population not entirely happy with rule from the far south.
And the
same geographical and ethnic distinctions and rivalries make
Khojand the best way into Tajikistan for journalists hoping
to get across the Tajik frontier into Afghanistan.
No flights
Neighbourly
loathing is such here in central Asia, that there are no flights
between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
There
are, weather permitting, planes between Khojand and Dushanbe.
So going
in, or, as we were, coming out, heavily laden pick-ups with
over-expectant representatives of the international media
come most days, rumbling into town over the ugly metal bridge
that spans what Alexander hoped would be a useful barrier
against barbarians
The new
barbarians demand rooms and bottled water and telephones -
or in our case first aid - before moving into or away from
a conflict Alexander would surely have well understood.
And Alexandria
the Furthest has to get used to being not as far as it would
like from the latest international crisis.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/from_our_own_correspondent/newsid_1620000/1620301.stm
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